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Super Size Me
IDP Films
10th September 2004 (UK)
IMDb Rating - 7.2/10
Rotten Tomatoes 92%
Certificate 12A
1 hour 40 minutes
Genres - Documentary, Comedy & Drama
£11,014,972
In 2004 a documentary about the fast food industry in America and the effects of eating fast food, more specifically eating just McDonald’s for one month straight. Morgan Spurlock took on the task of eating and drinking three square meals a day of nothing but McDonald’s fast food for one month, but the documentary also talks about law suits the public were taking out on the fast food industry at that time and also the experts and the public’s perception and opinion of fast food and the fast food industry.
In the documentary Spurlock consulted medical professionals before, during and after. The medical professionals were able to tell Spurlock and the audience about his health before he started and the changes that happened throughout the month that he took on the diet change. Throughout we watched the physical and mental changes that happened to Spurlock. In the documentary they talked about how members of the public were taking out lawsuits on fast food chains because they were knowingly selling unhealthy foods to the public.
On Rotten Tomatoes, a critic from New York Magazine/Vulture left a review on the website that said, “As entertaining as Super Size Me sometimes is, I’m not sure what Spurlock’s escapade really accomplishes, expect to emphasize that eating 5,000 calories a day, and exercising little, is bad for you.
After reading reviews on Rotten Tomatoes website, I read on the audience review section on Rotten Tomatoes talked about how this documentary wasn’t necessary or needed to be made, that the only thing the documentary told the audience was that simply fast food is bad for you.
After watching the documentary I thought that it was informative to the audience without being boring. It wasn’t the usual food documentary that simply reprimanded you for eating fast food, this documentary made the audience see first hand what fast food can do you, to your body physically and your mind, mentally.
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Capturing The Friedmans
Magnolia
9th April 2004 (UK)
IMDb Rating - 7.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes - 97%
Certificate 15
1 hour 47 minutes
Genres - Documentary & Biography
Box Office - £2,193,190
Capturing the Friedmans is a documentary about a seemingly normal family in the 1980’s until the father of the family Arnold Friedman and the youngest son, Jesse Friedman were arrested for child sexual abuse. The documentary came about when the director of the production Andrew Jerecki was preparing to document about child party entertainers when he found out about David Friedman’s father and brother.
David Friedman
Top Left to Right - Arnold, David, Seth, Elaine. Bottom Left - Jesse
The documentary is made up of interviews of family members, neighbours, officials, victims and archive footage of the family, the Friedmans, and a small section of Arnold Firedman’s personal video diary. The documentary opens up with the son and brother, David and the wife and mother, Elaine talking about Arnold Friedman, at that point you know the documentary is going to be about the late Arnold Friedman, but you don’t know why.
The review that I found on Rotten Tomatoes about this documentary, Capturing the Friedman’s was from The Film Yap, Nick Rogers he wrote a review saying “Like the darkest pop song Billy Joel never wrote, “Friedmans” hauntingly asked how far faith goes when it comes to family, how much mercy we’d grant them based merely on our memories and how forgiveness sometimes endures years of fury before it’s granted”
The second review I found on Rotten Tomatoes was by Philip Martin from Arkansas Democrat Gazette, where he said, “…an insane document, a slice of life that we probably should never have seen. But now that we have seen it, it’s too late to deny its crippling poignancy…”
My review on the documentary was that it was different, we seen an insight to some of the family members in this situation, which I haven’t seen any documentaries like that before. To me, what I picked up on was the son, David tried to make the audience see that he was just human, he did things that other people did, he was normal too. It also felt like Elaine was trying to justify what Arnold did. The interviews that were carried out through the documentary were used to show the different sides people seen of Arnold and Jesse Friedman, so people had horrifying experiences with them and some had normal experiences with them.
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Grizzly Man
Lions Gate
3rd February 2006 (UK)
IMDb Rating - 7.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes - 92%
Certificate 15
1 hour 42 minutes
Genres - Documentary & Biography
Box Office - £2,899,138
Grizzly Man is a 2005 documentary about a grizzly bear activist named Timothy Treadwell. Born in 1957 in Long Island, New York, he died on October 6th 2003, whilst living among bears in Katmai National Park, Alaska. During the summers that he lived among the grizzly bears he documented himself.
After the death of Timothy Treadwell, Werner Herzog created a documentary about Treadwell’s time among the grizzly bears, through interviews with the people who knew Treadwell. In the documentary he also used the footage that Treadwell, himself and Amie Huguenard shot during their times in Alaska. By the time of his death Timothy Treadwell has accumulated over 100 hours of footage. In the interviews they talk to Treadwell’s close friends, some of the people he knew through his new life style and they also interviewed his mother and father that he had not be close to for years.
Nick Roger, the Film Yap, reviewed Grizzly Man on Rotten Tomatoes, he says “Werner Herzog forgoes judging Timothy Treadwell’s disputed methods or questionable mental state – letting viewers decide based on footage that suggests Treadwell essentially sought some sort of transmutation from flesh to fur.”
On a blog called Lynn Cinnamon, the writer, Lynn has created a review on the ‘Grizzly Man’ documentary. In the conclusion of her review she writes, “Grizzly Man is the story of Timothy Treadwell, but not entirely his narrative. Grizzly Man is a grand collaboration. Herzog colours it with a blanket of doom and curiosity. He cuts together Timothy’s words, accenting them with very theatrical and dramatic interviews featuring people he knew. The interviews, as strange as they come off, are not unlike Timothy’s footage. He’s trying to tell a heroic story, one that bleeds into despair during candid moments, but always comes back to pure and pristine cause he wants to be fighting for. Herzog’s tale, but contrast, is a tragedy. (www.lynncinnamon.com/2015/07/grizzly-man-whos-the-real-timothy-treadwell/
After watching the documentary myself, I thought that Treadwell was very obsessive about grizzly bears, that much was obvious. I found that the way Werner Herzog created the ‘Grizzly Man’ documentary to be interesting on how he showed the uncut version of Treadwell, using the footage of Treadwell repeating himself and restarting his speeches when talking to the camera. I myself, found that it humanised Treadwell a little bit, compared to creating a documentary about a crazy man living with Grizzly bears for months every year, but that he was also human.
Even though I found the documentary interesting and the footage of Treadwell funny but still slightly creepy, I felt that the interview portion of the documentary was dull.
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Touching The Void
IFC Films
12th December 2003 (UK)
IMDb Rating - 8.1/10
Rotten Tomatoes - 94%
1 hour 46 minutes
Genres - Documentary & Adventure
Box Office - £4,527,224
Touching the Void is a documentary about 2 men, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates in 1985 attempting and completing the climb to reach Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. On the third day of their climb they reach the summit on the north ridge at around 2pm. Then the main journey of the documentary is the descent from the third afternoon onwards. The main climate of the documentary is the reveal of Joe Simpson falling and breaking his leg, driving his lower leg into his knee joint. From that point on the documentary explains their separate journey’s to the bas of the Andes, although the documentary focuses more on the journey of Simpson.
Joe Simpson
Simon Yates
Mark Halverson from Sacramento News and Reviews wrote on the Rotten Tomatoes Critics page his opinion on Touching the Void, “this harrowing, white-knuckle tale of human endurance and gut-wrenching dilemma mingles the dramatization of these events and interviews with both climbers into an unforgettable, sometimes comically deadpan nightmare.
Peter Rainer from the New York Magazine/Vulture on Rotten tomatoes reviewed Toughing the Void and said “Most movies of this type re-create the action far from the actual scene of the crime, but Macdonald has invented a new subgenre: a docudrama in which the docum and the drama are equally authentic”
Touching the Void uses reconstruction to show the audience of what the journey was like for Simpson and Yates during their climb. Joe Simpson, Simon Yates and Richard Hawking (man from base camp) talk about their journey to the camera individually about their time in the Peruvian Andes and the reconstruction connects with what they say.
My review of Touching the Void is that it is an excellent, the reconstruction really works well with what was being said in the interviews. One thing I would say is that there should have been a better introduction, through the documentary you had to work out who was Joe and who was Simon for yourself when watching the interview portion of the documentary, as I watched I figured out that Simon wore a light blue shirt and Joe wore a dark blue shirt.
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The Imposter
Insomnia Films
24th August 2012 (UK)
IMDb Rating - 7.5/10
Rotten Tomatoes - 95%
Certificate 15
1 hour 39 minutes
Genres - Documentary & Biography
Box Office - £700,000
On June 13th, 1994 a boy named Nicholas Barclay disappeared from his hometown in San Antonio, Texas. By the end of the documentary we find out that the man is not Nicholas Barclay, but a French man by the name of Frederic Bourdin who has stolen and posed as many different people. He was found three and a half years later in a village in Spain. The documentary uses reconstruction and interviews to create and tell the story. The reconstruction is used to help the audience create a visual that the interviews are creating.
Frederic Bourdin
Through reading reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, I found a review by Tom Charity from Sight and Sound that read “More than anything it’s Layton’s storytelling acumen that impresses - the movie unfolds like a physiological thriller, and in the second half effects a chilling twist on its own inherent implausibility” Another review from Rotten Tomatoes is from Louise Keller from Urban Cinefile, she said “The revelations never stop. The title tells us what the story is about, but it is impossible to imagine the complex elements that involve not only the central character, but those who accept him as the person he pretends to be.”
My review of the documentary is that filming of the documentary was really good, one thing that I noticed, that I had to look very closely at was that it was shot in an interview style were everyone seemed to look off camera at someone except Frederic Bourdin. I myself don’t believe that the family didn’t know that it wasn’t their Nicholas, they seem really suspicious, until I watched a video about the documentary when I was looking for reviews. It was that in the documentary Bourdin points fingers at the family, more specially Jason and that makes us suspicious, but Bourdin was also a pathological liar who pretends to be people he wasn’t. So, the documentary to me is about who do you really believe and why?
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Catfish
Universal Pictures
17th December 2010 (UK)
IMDb Rating - 7.1/10
Rotten Tomatoes - 80%
Certificate 12A
1 hour 27 minutes
Genres - Documentary & Drama
Box Office - £3,234,373
Catfish is a documentary film about the story of Yaniv Schulman’s budding online relationship with a girl named Megan Faccio in 2007. Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost started to document Nev’s 8 month journey through an online relationship. Eventually in the documentary we find out that Nev’s budding relationship with Megan Faccio is not real because Faccio does not exist. We find out that Angela Wesselman stole Aimee Gozales identity by using her photos to pretend to be a women called Megan Faccio.
Yaniv ‘Nev’ Schulman
‘Megan Faccio’ Aimee Gonzales
Angela Wesselman
The documentary, film ‘Catfish’ after release was then continued on as a spin-off Television series that helped other people find out if they are being Catfished or the situations they are in are happening with real people.
This documentary and spin off television series created the term ‘catfishing’ as a phenomenon of internet predators that fabricate online identities and entire social circles to trick people into emotional/romantic relationships. www.urbandictionary.com
Some reviews that have been posted on the critics page on Rotten Tomatoes, about Catfish were; one from Tim Robey from the Daily Telegraph said, “The film begs lots of questions about how, and when, it became clear any of this was worth documenting, but it certainly was.”
Ali Gray from TheShiznit.co.uk reviewed Catfish as “a unique documentary – like Capturing the Friedmans, it starts as one thing and mutates into a completely different, terrifying animal halfway through.”
My review of the documentary is that it opened and dove into a part of the internet that had not be discussed before and was becoming increasingly popular in 2008 and after. They try to set out the documentary to be as real as possible, that everything that is being recorded in real time, they do it very well.
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Bowling For Columbine
United Artists Films
15th November 2002 (UK)
IMDb Rating - 8/10
Rotten Tomatoes - 96%
Certificate 15
2 hours 3 minutes
Genres - Documentary, Crime and Drama
Box Office - £21,300,000
In 2002 Michael Moore an American film maker made a documentary about Gun violence, Bowling at Columbine. The documentary is about Moore looking into the gun violence in the United States and why it is so high compared to other places outside of USA. Moore looks at and talks to different types of people and their opinions on the matter of gun violence in the United States.
Michael Moore
Robert Denerstein from the Denver Rocky Mountain News wrote a review on Rotten Tomatoes about Bowling for Columbine that said the documentary was “A sweeping, sometimes insightful and often funny look at America’s culture of violence.”
Another review from Rotten Tomatoes about the documentary Bowling for Columbine, this time the review was from the audience review section instead of the critic’s review. The review said “You may not agree with Moore’s sometimes questionable methods, but there is no denying that he presents some very strong arguments in the important, thought provoking exposé of what drives and motivates these occurrences in a country where fear is instilled into people by a crippling system.
My view and review on Bowling for columbine is that the documentary is quite subjective about the documentaries topic of Gun Violence. Although the topic of the documentary is a serious and heavy subject, Moore’s approach to the documentary brings an air of humour and laughter.
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World at War
Episode 20 - Genocide
ITV
27th March 1974 (UK)
IMDb Rating - 9.2/10
Certificate 15
52 minutes
Genres - Documentary, History & War
From October 1973 to 1974 a TV series made up of 26 different episodes were released to the public on television, all the episodes were historical stories from the Second World War.
All the episodes were narrated by Laurence Olivier, there were multiple different directors throughout the series.
Michael Darlow was the director of episode 20, the episode was about Genocide in 1941 to 1945. Genocide is when a large group of people are deliberately killed because they are a particular group. In World War II, the genocide was the Nazi’s persecuting 6 million Jews. The episode entailed interviews with people who were on both sides of the war, people from concentration camps, Nazi’s who were fully devoted to the creation of the pure Aryan race and also Nazi’s who became hesitant when they seen what was happening in the death camps.
Olivier (pictured above) was the narrator of the episode, yet he was never seen at all in the released episode, (in the original episode Olivier appeared on screen, it was the only time he ever appeared in the series). I feel that he was not shown at all because when he was talking they would show archived footage, as it was the only thing on screen it would keep the audience focused on what was happening and Olivier’s voice describing what was going on would help the audience understand what was happening in the footage.
Olivier’s narration was objective to the documentary, he talked about the facts that were known and he was neutral throughout the episode, the achieve footage also played on the objective side. With the interviews the documentary became subjective, as the people interviewed were from both sides of the war, each person has their own view of the happenings of the war and therefore we hear different sides of story that can change your own view of the Genocide of the Jew between 1941 to 1945, which makes it subjective.
For example, a subjective event within the episode would be having an opinion that every Nazi in the war was evil and knew what they were doing. Yet in the documentary we see a man talking about how when putting children in the gas chamber he felt he was going to be sick, which brings the opinion that they did no know fully what was happening in the death camps.
When talking about how reconstruction wasn’t used, I think that reconstruction was not used because, there was achieve footage available, so it could be used in knowing that it was the full truth of what happened and not dramatized, it would show the gruesome truth. Also another reason that it was not reconstructed was because it is such a sensitive topic and it was very disturbing, also knowing that the footage was reconstructed, audiences make not take it as serious as the topic is.
I thought that the documentary kept a balance between objective and subjective, it hit the audience with true, gruesome archived footage of the genocide in World War II and then used interviews from survivors and Nazis’ and other people with knowledge of the Second World War.
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